Video teleconferencing is utilized to enable collaboration and meetings to take place between participants in locations remote from one another. A video communication session is created by one of the participants through a provisioning process whereby a user interacts with a video communication system to reserve a set of resources in advance of a scheduled meeting time. The video communication system generates an advertisement or similar message that is sent to the participants to enable them to connect with the video communication system at the scheduled time. This message includes instructions on connecting to the video communication system and provides a video communication session identifier and a video communication session password. Without this provisioning process the participants cannot utilize the video communication system to communicate with one another.
The participants utilize a personal computer or mobile device that executes a specialized client application that connects to the video communication system when connecting to the provisioned video communication session. The video communication system restricts access to the provisioned video communication session to a set of users provided by the user that set up the video teleconference. Only those participants specified at the time of provisioning can connect to the video communication session. The users must provide the video communication session identifier generated by the video communication system along with the password to enable connection to the video communication session.